The country's new robots.txt file — Here's a small and nerdy measure of the huge change in the executive branch of the US government today. Here's the robots.txt file from whitehouse.gov yesterday: … And it goes on like that for almost 2400 lines! Here's the new Obamafied robots.txt file:

Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov — Welcome to the new WhiteHouse.gov. I'm Macon Phillips, the Director of New Media for the White House and one of the people who will be contributing to the blog. — A short time ago, Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States …

Turning the page on Print Ads — Labels: Announcements, Google Print Ads — In the last few months, we've been taking a long, hard look at all the things we are doing to ensure we are investing our resources in the projects that will have the biggest impact for our users and partners.

Payment Processor Breach May Be Largest Ever — A data breach last year at Princeton, N.J., payment processor Heartland Payment Systems may have compromised tens of millions of credit and debit card transactions, the company said today. — If accurate, such figures may make the Heartland incident …

Inauguration Day, by the numbers — Updated at 2:53 p.m. PST to add statistics from the New York Times. — From what early numbers are indicating, the historic swearing-in of President Barack Obama was not the biggest traffic day for the Internet. But for many social networks and digital-media sites …

Twitter catches up to Digg — Twitter has become a popular pastime for many who like to update their daily thoughts and activates, as well as for the voyeurs who just enjoy reading the tweets. Last week, the market share of visits to Twitter surpassed Digg for the first time since launch and was ranked #84 …

Real-Time News: PubSub Gets Ready for a Comeback — In 2002, PubSub released an interesting and useful product that provided a real-time search engine for RSS feeds, flight information, Usenet posts, and even earthquake updates. Sadly, PubSub closed its doors in 2007 and its assets were bought by Something Simpler.

The Hyves Hype! — It really sounds strange, but mysteriously it just works... At the moment, it's possible to check if a domain got penalized for selling links (or lost pagerank due any other kind of malicious activity). — The only thing you gotta do is put “hyves” as a subdomain in front of the domain to be checked.

Test Pilot: Vision — How many tabs does an average user use at a time? How about novice users? How often is the stop button pressed? How many times do people open a new tab to perform a search? — There are hundreds of questions like these whose answers would help quantitatively inform the design process of Firefox.

Microsoft expected to cut jobs as profit weakens — NEW YORK/BOSTON (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp is expected to post a quarterly profit that misses its own target and announce thousands of job cuts this week as the global economic slump hurts even the technology industry's biggest players.

Microsoft considers moving 30 percent of vendors off-site — One page in an internal Microsoft PowerPoint presentation reviewed by the Seattle P-I shows that Microsoft executives have considered a plan to either move 30 percent of Microsoft's vendors who work on campus off of Microsoft properties …

Google Notebook Import, New Zoho Notebook Plug-in & more... After we rolled out an update last week with several enhancements to Zoho Notebook, we got several requests from users asking us to further enhance the app with some specific features. We now updated Zoho Notebook with some of these new features …

Microsoft Sells Entire Comcast Stake — Microsoft (MSFT) disclosed in an SEC filing on Friday that it has sold its entire 7.3% stake in Comcast (CMCSA) Class A common stock. Microsoft had owned 150,935,575 shares. — In a research note this morning, Bernstein Research analyst Craig Moffett notes …

Seagate's Update Bricking Working HDDs — Seagate recently released a preventative firmware update for Barracuda 7200.11 drives affected by a faulty firmware which caused the drive to lock up and fail to be detected by the BIOS. Unfortunately, the updating process has not gone smoothly for many people …